In Smirnoff’s recent ‘We Are Open’ campaign, a TV advert says, ‘labels are for bottles not people’. This got church related community worker (CRCW) Rosie Buxton – who works for the Swansea region of churches in Wales – thinking about the labels attached to people, intentionally or not …
CRCW ministry is about people, not projects. As Helen Stephenson says in her reflection, ‘Church related community work is not about projects it’s about people’, but unfortunately, we like to put labels on people and situations.
Labels are the first way people are defined. Vulnerable, disadvantaged, troubled, challenging, disabled, celebrity, addict, Christian, Muslim, lonely, financially inactive, refugee, asylum seeker to name but a few. We get so caught up in labels, we forget the human being behind them.